Abstract

This paper analyzes the design space for crafting systems within games. A
crafting system is the collection of game mechanics which enable a player to
create virtual objects within a game, with examples ranging from making a
pickaxe or placing blocks in Minecraft, to
combining ingredients to create items in World of
Warcraft, or designing a city in SimCity. Within both game design and game journalism there is no
systematic understanding of what crafting means in games—rather, the term is
used in an informal "I’ll know it when I see it" way, with
different ideas of what constitutes "crafting" becoming
conventional for different game genres. We aim to create a more systematic
analysis and language for virtual crafting, using a design space approach where
we identify seven features of crafting systems; any given crafting system is
understood in terms of the degree and manner in which it exemplifies these
features. The features we identify are: recipe definition (how well-defined are
the player steps for creating a virtual object), fidelity of action (how
detailed is the player-performed enactment of crafting), completion constraints
(how is creation constrained by virtual "resources"),
variable outcome (how much can the result vary when the player performs the same
crafting actions), system recognition of outcome (to what degree do other game
systems "understand" and take account of what a player has
made), player expressiveness (how big is the creative space provided to the
player), and progression (how do the possibilities of crafting change over
time). We apply these dimensions to the analysis of 64 crafting systems across
47 example games. This more systematic analysis of the crafting system design
space provides a deeper understanding of how games function as a creative and
artistic medium for players, and provides a language and framework enabling
scholars, critics and developers to more deeply understand existing crafting
systems as well as unexplored opportunities for future crafting systems.

Introduction

Crafting in games affords a unique kind of interactive experience, only possible
in playable media, and made increasingly rich with the complex computational
modeling of videogames[1]. It enables
players to create items and structures without the cost, effort, and destructive
modification of raw materials in the real world. It provides spaces of playful
experimentation and creative expression, wherein ordinary people can design and
create whole buildings, cities, geographies, machines, rocketships, gardens, and
creatures, without a difficult-to-acquire formal education, specialized
knowledge, or extraordinary resources. Games provide a context of playfulness
that removes the inhibiting pressure to make something perfect or to fulfill a
practical purpose. Crafting in games often supports creativity as intrinsically
pleasurable, rather than as a commodified, extrinsically-motivated way to
accomplish tasks, much like the casual creators genre identified by Compton and
Mateas [Compton 2015]. It also means that people can create things
that would be altogether impossible in the real world. These creations then
exist in the context of a game world; what players craft in a game becomes part
of the game, taking on a new life, whether becoming part of a graphically
modeled, physically simulated landscape, or an item that the player-character
can use, wear, trade, or consume. This is all to say that crafting in games,
while sharing much in common with real-world crafting or digitally augmented
crafting[2], is also made significantly different by its
context in playable systems.

Crafting is a creative and pleasurable alternative gaming experience—thus often
speaking to different audiences than playable media centered around combat
systems or resource management. While players can be creative and express
themselves through game actions that do not involve creating [Wright et al. 2002], creativity that results in the existence of
something new supports a creative pleasure not obtainable otherwise. SimCity, The Sims, and
Minecraft, while vastly different in subject
matter (urban planning, house design and decoration, and block placement,
respectively), are all underwritten by player creation in virtual worlds, and
have all been highly influential, popular-culture phenomena in their times. Much
of their connected successes are in the novel experiences they enable, all
primarily driven by crafting. These pioneering, crafting-focused games have
transformed the playable media landscape, inspiring entirely new genres of
simulation and open-world, sandbox games [Ondrejka 2004]
[Rose 2014]. A new, more diverse audience of players has also been
drawn to these experiences, noteworthy in the field’s straight, white,
male-dominated history and tenacious reputation [Kafai et al. 2008]
[Shaw 2015]. SimCity and The Sims drew mainstream media headlines for their
equal gender appeal [Paulk 2006]
[Thompson 2003], and Minecraft has
been deployed in diverse classrooms for experimental creation-based learning
[Smaldone et al. 2016].

Making, creating, building—the language typically used to describe these
experiences—are vague descriptions for the complex fields of creativity and
design. We need to build a finer critical vocabulary around these systems to
more effectively discuss them. Additionally, crafting systems are often deeply
integrated into other game systems and mechanics, or operations of the game:
working as the production side to a rich in-game economy, or as vehicles for
player or game progression. Understanding the kinds of play crafting affords the
player, or where a crafting system could fit into a larger game’s context, is
currently under-explored in game studies.

To build this understanding, we construct a taxonomy of crafting in games.
Taxonomies are a common tool in game studies, often used to discuss either types
of players [Bartle 1996] or games and simulations themselves [Klabbers 2003]. We take the latter, game-centric approach.
Taxonomies create a shared vocabulary around complicated concepts to allow a
deeper and better-organized study of those concepts, which is the aim of this
article.

When a player performs actions similar to those of a real-life crafter, or goes
about creating a virtual object using the mechanics, the system of those
mechanics may be colloquially known as a crafting system by the game’s designers
and/or players. "Crafting" is advertised as a feature of
games from World of Warcraft to Minecraft (and is even included in some of their
names). However, games implement their "crafting" vastly
differently; in World of Warcraft, crafting is
highly abstracted, conducted through menus, and linked into a vast player
economy of items, goods and services. Crafting in Minecraft is far closer to playing with LEGOs, as Minecraft structures are built by players placing
virtual blocks on one another. These creations range from giant masterpieces to
bare-bones boxes that let players survive the dangerous night. This type of
Minecraft crafting is quite different even from
several other crafting systems within Minecraft
where players use a dedicated set of crafting menus to instantaneously create
and place objects into the player’s inventory. A third contrasting example would
be Kittens Game, a text-only browser idle[3], or incremental, game which includes evolving recipes[4] and large-scale automation. A quick look at these three
games shows three very different forms of design and creation within game
crafting systems.

We aim to break down the above, very broad definition and focus on seven
different facets of crafting systems in games: Recipe Definition, Fidelity of
Action, Completion Constraints, Variable Outcome, Recognition of Outcome, Player
Expressiveness, and Progression.

Figure 1.

A radial graph showing all seven dimensions of crafting systems as well as
an example system: House Decoration from Animal
Crossing. The dimensions are: Recipe Definition, Fidelity of
Action, Completion Constraints, Variable Outcome, Recognition of Outcome,
Player Expressiveness, and Progression. All 47 games analyzed for this paper
and for the accompanying visualization were given scores on each
dimension.

To generate these dimensions, we started by carefully reviewing a selection of
games that have clear instances of player creation. We looked at the games
themselves, as well as secondary literature around these games. Because crafting
is tied strongly to the real world, we also reviewed literature around
non-virtual crafting. Our taxonomy is built from concepts that have been
identified in other games studies work, as well as important concepts in the
study of real-world crafting.

After this initial review, we struggled to relate the many and often disparate
features of crafting in games. We could not find a
"canonical" crafting game, nor did we find it effective
to try to describe a set of categories that neatly discretizes the space into
mutually-exclusive groups of games or crafting systems. We instead identified
core attributes of crafting which different crafting systems had to varying
degrees. The attributes were orthogonal and nonhierarchical; having one
attribute didn’t require or preclude a game from having any other. Drawing
inspiration from past work in game studies by Jesper Juul, we created a
seven-dimensional model of crafting systems that described meaningful mechanical
differences within the games [Juul 2005]. This inclusive taxonomy
approach, involving placing terms at an intersection of orthogonal, scalar
dimensions, has proven illuminating and influential in game studies and is
further discussed below. After we first drafted our dimensions, largely inspired
by our survey of prototypical crafting games and literature on real-world
crafting, we set about formally encoding specific games in the taxonomy
one-by-one (or assigning values for them on each dimension). This process
revealed some ambiguities and redundancy in the taxonomy, which we then fixed.
We refined our taxonomy in this way over the course of about three months,
adding to our set of sample games, discussing and plotting them on the
dimensions, editing—and sometimes removing—dimensions, and repeating the
plotting process over again for all games collected thus far. We stopped when we
no longer needed to refine the taxonomy to adequately capture new sample games,
and when our set of sample games was sufficiently large and diverse, even
capturing edge-case crafting systems. A full report of every crafting system we
evaluated, their rankings on each dimension, and a brief description with
justifications accompanies this document as a stand-alone visualization website,
which can be found here: users.soe.ucsc.edu/~agrow/craftsystems[5]. Github
access to the visualization website, minus the additional gifs, can also be
found here: github.com/agrow/craftsystems.

This paper examines the role of crafting systems in games and analyzes seven
design dimensions of crafting mechanics. First, we’ll examine some related work
to give a perspective on various frameworks in use in game studies, and then
take a brief historical tour of real-life crafting and design literature. Then
we’ll break down each crafting dimension in detail, going over what the
dimension scores represent and giving some illustrative example games at
different positions along the dimension. Next, we will mention important
external forces involved with a crafting system, such as social play and player
communities, and how those forces interact with the design dimensions. Finally,
we’ll wrap up the taxonomy and invite future discussion on the topic.

Related Work & Background Concepts

Game Studies

The work presented in this paper falls under the realm of game studies. As
previously mentioned, the core organizational method we use stems from
Jesper Juul and previous work on taxonomies as applied to game studies.

Taxonomies in Game Studies

Taxonomies are a common tool in game studies as the medium has rapidly
been expanding. Ellington, along with his co-authors [Ellington et al. 1982], breaks games up into three pure types
(pure games, pure simulations, and pure case studies), and four hybrids
(simulation games, simulated case studies, games used as case studies,
and simulation games used as case studies).

Callois uses a two-dimensional system to classify games [Callois 1961]. The first one is built around four
categories: Agon, Alea, Mimicry and Ilinx. Agon refers competition and
balance, with all players having an equal chance of success. Alea refers
to luck, with players having little control over the game’s outcome.
Mimicry is about pretending to be someone else, and Ilinx refers to the
feeling of vertigo and attempting to disrupt normal sensory patterns.
Callois’ second dimension is focused on the rule base: Piada, freedom
for improvisation, is opposed to Ludus, rules and conventions.

Shubik also breaks apart free-form games and rigid rule-based games, but
additionally considers how the game teaches concepts to the player [Shubik 1983]. Klabbers builds a taxonomy of games by
combining concepts from social systems theory with a semiotic theory of
gaming, dividing agents in game into actors, rules and resources, each
with their own syntax, semantics and pragmatics [Klabbers 2003].

Taxonomies have also been brought to bear to try to understand the people
that play games, instead of games themselves. Bartle breaks players into
four types: achievers, socializers, explorers and killers [Bartle 1996]. These four types sit across two axes:
whether players prefer action or interaction (the first) with other
players or the game world (the second). Similarly, Yee also talks about
player motivations in online games [Yee 2006]. Yee breaks
down player motivations into three primary categories (achievement,
social and immersion) and ten subcategories. In a meta-analysis, Smith
et. al. present a taxonomy of player modeling approaches, such as
examining whether the player model is general or specific, or
categorizes based on human reactions or game actions [Smith et al. 2011].

This list is by no means exhaustive, but gives an idea of how taxonomies
are often used in games studies: to talk about games as a whole and
players of particular kinds of games. In only a few cases, we can see
categorizations of design approaches that can be similar to a taxonomy,
such as Lewis’ collection of motivational design strategies [Lewis 2014]. Individual game systems are less likely to be
the focus of a taxonomy, and we focus on one particular game system:
crafting.

Dimensions of Games

In the book Half Real, Juul evaluates seven
definitions of "games" and synthesizes a single
definition that he terms "the classic game model"
[Juul 2005, 23]. This definition is intended to apply to all
"traditionally constructed" games from different
cultures and across the 5,000-year history of games. In order to
accomplish this, Juul surveyed game definitions to extract concepts
necessary to all games:

[A] good definition should describe these three
things: (1) the system set up by the rules of the game, (2) the
relation between the game and the player of the game, and (3)
the relation between the game and the rest of the world.
[Juul 2005, 28]

After synthesizing seven different scholars’ previous definitions
of games [Juul 2005, 30], Juul derives six common
features to compose his own definitional framework: fixed rules,
variable outcome, valorization of outcome, player effort, player
attachment to outcome, and negotiable consequences [Juul 2005, 36]. Juul uses these features as measuring
sticks to determine how game-like an experience is. A game
has all of these features, while experiences like gambling or open-ended
simulations are borderline cases, and even looser experiences like
storytelling or free-form play are simply not games. Some features are
binary, such has alternative ending in an experience counting as not
having a fixed outcome. However, whether that uncertainty is based on
skill, luck, or how impactful it is on the experience of the outcome may
be lost.

Those experiences that are too far off of the canonical game to count as
a game still have a place on Juul’s model. Readers can argue that
free-form play should count as a borderline case because free-form play
can spontaneously contain many of these game features. In making that
argument, readers such as [Deterding et al. 2011] and [Myers 2009] are using Juul’s features and critical
language to dissect and analyze games regardless of where they
ultimately land on the graph. Juul admits that his model "is no longer all there is to games"
[Juul 2005, 53]. We understand that our model is also not all there is to
crafting systems. However, Juul understands his model is an abstract
tool, "an abstract platform upon which games are
built, a platform that games use in different ways"
[Juul 2005, 54]. We see our work, following Juul in outlining dimensions, as a
new foundational and abstract tool by which to examine crafting in
games.

Unfortunately, we lack solid definitions of craft systems as this paper
refers to them. [Tychsen and Hitchens 2009] and [Consalvo 2009] refer to "crafting" as
reference to the colloquial category of crafting professions/skills/jobs
in MMOs, and [Leung et al. 2014] is a patent for a
"Crafting system in a virtual environment" that
attempts to define their use of "crafting systems"
with the following:

Provided herein is a crafting system that allows
users or players of a website to create their own “unique”
virtual items for use on the site. With the crafting systems,
players can collect materials from within a virtual social
environment to customize items, which the player can use to
express their individuality. Crafting can include materials such
as, but not limited to, textiles and related finishes, edible
materials, paint, as well as clay, stones and other earthen and
organic materials to create pottery. Crafted items include but
are not limited to clothing, shoes, accessories, jewelry, food,
beverages, dishes, ceramics, paintings or other forms of artwork
and designs and furniture.
[Leung et al. 2014]

This broad definition, while attempting to enumerate some
materials and end products, describes the patent’s crafting system, not
crafting systems in general, nor crafting systems within games. Without
clear definitions of crafting systems suitable for game studies, we
surveyed a broad spectrum of games, including explicit and implicit
crafting systems, to find our dimensions of a crafting system: Recipe
Definition, Fidelity of Action, Completion Constraints, Variable
Outcome, Recognition of Outcome, Player Expressiveness, and Progression
(see Figure 1). These dimensions will be fully developed in the core of
the paper, Definition and Dimensions of Crafting in Games, following our
examination of real-world crafting as a basis for the cultural
understanding of crafting systems in games.

The Evolution of Crafts

Operationalized and systemic representations of crafting, like those found in
games, are necessarily in dialog with cultural conceptions of real-world
crafting, which is a contested subject in and of itself. To better
understand what would cause a developer to declare a system a crafting
system, or to build an implied crafting-like system, we examined how
crafting formed and exists today in the real world.

Paul Greenhalgh separates the history and characteristics of craft history
into three threads: decorative art, the
vernacular, and the politics of work
[Dormer 1997, 25]. These attributes cover the split
between art and craft, public opinion of handmade goods over time, and the
connection of crafts to mercantilism and the economy, all of which have
affected crafting representations in games.

Decorative vs. High Art

In the West, roughly since the Renaissance when Academies were being
created, the five fine arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, music,
and poetry became privileged over other artistic professions [Dormer 1997, 27]. Other arts, which Greenhalgh calls
decorative arts, were considered by some to be too
functional or made of too-cheap materials for the designation of fine
art [Dormer 1997, 29]. Games often use the signifiers
of high art, usually easels, paint brushes, or tubes of paint, to
unequivocally represent creative or artistic endeavours, such as The Sims (see Figure 2). The modern resurgence
of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) culture and the indie (independent) craft
movement celebrate all forms of art high, low, and undiscovered [Levine and Heimerl 2008]. The wide variety of crafting systems this
paper discusses aligns with the indie view and includes high art,
decorative art, and creative skills that may have no real-world
equivalent.

Figure 2.

The icon for the “Artistic” skill in Sims
III is a paintbrush, and is often raised when characters
paint on in-game easels.

The Vernacular

After the privileging of high art, the vernacular surrounding the
decorative arts of rural pre-industrial country craftsmen was
unfavorable until the late 19th century, when it took on the perception
of being "unpolluted" and
"authentic" when compared to mass-produced goods
[Dormer 1997, 31]. The common opinion of handmade
items has oscillated between these favorable and unfavorable views for
the last century. In Handmade Nation,
Andrew Wanger speaks of the 60’s and 70’s "hippy
counterculture," how 80’s and 90’s artists distanced
themselves from hippies by focusing on galleries and museums, and today
we have another DIY resurgence [Levine and Heimerl 2008, 2–3].
Debbie Stoller in Stitch ‘n Bitch traces a
more nuanced history of knitting in particular: how each generation
either snubs the "silly domestic work" or takes up
the needles through necessity or pride, such as in times of economic
hardship or war [Stoller 2003, 13]. Some alternative
terms we have heard refer to this DIY resurgence include maker practice
or maker movement, hacker culture, and appropriation of handicrafts [Tanenbaum et al. 2013].

Craftivists, practitioners of a specific subculture of the maker
movement, create crafts as a means of political self-expression, such as
graffitiing with yarn, or "yarn bombing," in the
effort to reclaim cold public spaces [Mould 2014]. Some
games such as Jet Set Radio, a
rollerblading action game about tagging graffiti and evading
authorities, attempt to faithfully model transgressive behaviors. We
would consider transgressive crafts within games as within the scope of
this paper. The practice of taking "Grandma’s
crafts"—traditionally feminine crafts, such as scrapbooking,
knitting, sewing, and other textile crafts, used to convey
"deceivingly harmless" messages reinforcing
gender, religious, political, or familial identity or ideology—and
inverting, twisting, or otherwise subverting their usual
meaning is known as subversive crafting [Winge and Stalp 2013].
Modding, a jargon term for modifying a game in any way
outside of the scope of the gameplay, could be considered subversive or
transgressive craft if the craft in question is game creation or game
authoring [Letzter 2015]. However, the scope of this paper
is crafting systems modeled within games, and, in general,
modding games themselves is a higher level of abstraction than the focus
of this paper.

Many sources, including those cited previously as well as David
Gauntlett’s book Making is Connecting,
speak to the current renaissance of craft knowledge and products spread
throughout the internet [Gauntlett 2013]. Popular websites
such as Ravelry, Craftster, and Instructables
encourage users to share their own patterns; and commerce websites like
Etsy or Amazon:
Handmade exist for users to sell their handmade goods and
materials. It is not surprising, then, to see crafting systems and other
creative acts being integrated into more games, leveraging art, craft,
DIY, and engineering visual design or theming with or without mechanics
or systemic models of crafting[6]. A game’s
craft aesthetic can wrap around and re-influence real-life crafting,
which has been reported by the developers of Little
Big Planet
[Westecott 2011]. Games that do make crafting
playable are also often supported with a library of patterns, economies,
and player strategies that mirror communities of real-life crafts (see
Social Aspects below for more detail).

Craft and Creativity

The Industrial Revolution’s toll on an individual’s creative freedom was
being felt widely enough to seed an international shift in values, the
Arts and Crafts movement, across Europe, in other nations in the British
empire, in North America, and later in Japan [Dormer 1997, 35–36]. This movement defined and popularized the concept of
“craft” as this paper refers to it: as a creative endeavor alongside and
sometimes including the fine arts [Dormer 1997, 38].
In the games we have analyzed, we consider everything from drawing to
city-building and spell-crafting to fall under the umbrella of
crafts.

What is creativity, then, as a necessary component of a creative
endeavor? In general, many researchers of human and/or computer
creativity agree that the "standard definition" is
some combination of originality (or novelty, or innovation) and
effectiveness (or appropriateness, or usefulness, or value) [Runco and Jaeger 2012]. Most games do not try to operationalize or
evaluate creativity and instead leave it up to player interpretation.
However, some games, such as those discussed in the System Recognition
dimension, attempt to procedurally evaluate, model, or simulate some
qualities of entities made by the player.

Related to evaluation of crafts is motivation: why do people craft, in
games or otherwise? Unfortunately, to the authors’ knowledge, there is
not a quality source that outlines what motivates players to craft in
games. We can, however, extrapolate from the reasons why people craft in
general and begin to evaluate how they may or may not apply to crafting
in games. Winge and Stalp did an ethnographic study of 44 crafters,
primarily subversive ones, and some of their reasonings were: for
necessity (or lack thereof), to develop skills (learn), to relax, to
have fun, to create a supportive space, and to develop identity [Winge and Stalp 2013]. Many find it "therapeutic"
to quietly reflect, or think about nothing at all, and to watch a
product slowly unfold [Winge and Stalp 2013, 75]. To summarize,
some craft to make a specific object or outcome, and others for the
process of making regardless of the outcome. While the value of a
specific object may be worth the cost of admission to create it, in the
real world or in a game, the process is the more interesting motivation
here. Through Csikszentmihalyi, we find a common thread to games and
crafting: the flow state [Csikszentmihalyi 1996]. While
not the only feeling involved in the process of crafting, the flow
state—where there is a balance of challenge and skill that consumes a
person’s whole concentration—is shared with gaming in general, as well
as crafting within the game, and is likely one major motivator for
players to seek crafting systems in games.

Aesthetic Diversity

According to David Pye in The Nature and Art of
Workmanship, workmanship can be broken into two contrasting
groups, "the workmanship of risk" and "the
workmanship of certainty"
[Pye 1968]. The workmanship of risk is workmanship where
the quality of the result is at risk during the process of making—a
workman can make mistakes in the act of crafting. In the workmanship of
certainty, the quality of the item is predetermined at design time,
usually by automation [Pye 1968, 20].

To Pye, the quality of a craft is determined based on how closely it
follows or augments a particular intended design. Regulated workmanship
is when the design and final crafting result very closely match. By
definition, the workmanship of certainty is regulated. The workmanship
of risk is permitted to be worse than the design (thwarting it) or
better (augmenting it).

While the quality variation of the workmanship of risk may seem
undesirable, Pye argues that it is desirable for producing subtle
variation across created objects. Mass production (and the high degree
of the workmanship of certainty required for it) "lack[s] all depth, subtlety, overtones,
variegation, diversity…"
[Pye 1968, 19].

We call this property "aesthetic diversity", the
quality of having many variations on a theme in a collection of crafted
objects. This sort of variation is often not enacted in crafting
systems, in fact, crafting systems almost always fall under the
workmanship of certainty. Reasons for this are discussed in the
Undefined Recipes and the Variable Outcome dimensions. Automation
affordances often work against aesthetic diversity, as is discussed in
Automation.

Definition and Dimensions of Crafting in Games

We further develop our preliminary definition of crafting in games:
crafting in a game is the set of mechanics and interactions by
which players thoughtfully manipulate materials to create a new entity in the
game world. The entity[7] might be
created from scratch, or created by modifying or augmenting something that
existed before crafting. The entity may be animate or inanimate, a
representative of real-life crafting or some fully imaginary and virtual form of
crafting only possible in the abstractions of playable media. Resources are
often consumed or transformed in the creation process, but don’t have to be. The
mechanics and interactions which comprise crafting include actions and choices
that players make during the creation process,[8]
and the game system’s immediate responses and mechanical interactions with those
actions and choices. Players should enact these actions and choices with the
intention of making something, and with the feeling that accompanies, even if
they don’t know precisely what the created thing will be. And finally, the
creation process and the created entity are explicitly represented in the
context of the game world[9].

In this definition, we aim to outline a general game experience for which the
following design dimensions may be a useful analytical tool, rather than
prescribe a narrow characterization of what crafting in games always is and
always will be. Creating virtual objects in games happens in many genres and
thematic domains, in both computational and non-computational games, and in
dialog with many other game systems. The proposed seven-dimensional framework
cuts across these differences, posing questions and design considerations, and
mapping the experiential space in a way that a narrow definition cannot. We
propose that the wide definition offered above be used as a rough guideline for
what games to apply the dimensions to, in order to answer game studies and game
design questions more useful than, "Is it a crafting system?"

What follows are descriptions of seven dimensions or axes that characterize and
explore the space of possibilities surrounding crafting in games. While similar
to Jesper Juul’s dimensions of games, our dimensions will differ from his in
that in his system there is a canonical concept of game as exemplified by games
like chess. Games that score high on all of his dimensions converge on this
canonical concept. In contrast, there is no canonical crafting system, just as
there is no canonical real-life craft or way to craft. So there is no position
along the dimensions that converges to a canonical crafting concept, no position
along any given dimension that is implicitly preferred. Rather, each point on
each dimension supports different kinds of experiences and play. Among the 64
systems surveyed and discussed here, some readers may also contest particular
examples as not "crafting" systems, according to common game
cultures’ understandings of crafting. However, we illustrate that the framework
is designed to surface useful discussion wherever players create things in
virtual worlds. It is intended to serve as a lens, rather than a box, and is
informed but not prescribed by the sometimes arbitrary labeling traditions of
different gaming communities. We have sampled a wide enough range of different
systems to both stretch the boundaries of our dimensions, as well as illustrate
combinations of characteristics that have yet to be implemented as gaming
experiences in order to help discover them.

It is important to note that the seven dimensions characterize individual
crafting systems, not games within which crafting systems are embedded.
Individual games can have multiple crafting systems. Games like Minecraft are so committed to crafting that they have
multiple, interwoven playable models of crafting, each of which will have their
own characterization along the crafting design dimensions.

We now describe each dimension in depth. While there is no intrinsic dimension
order, they are presented here roughly in order of the crafting process as
enacted by the player. We begin with qualities that primarily describe the
enactments of crafting: Recipe Definition, Fidelity of Action, and Completion
Constraints. That is followed by what happens after that process is enacted:
Variable Outcome and System Recognition of Outcome. Our list concludes with
qualities of the larger game experience within which the player may have enacted
crafting many times: Player Expressiveness and Progression.

Recipe Definition

A recipe is a representation of the knowledge necessary to
transform a collection of game objects (ingredients or raw materials) into a
new object. For example (described more below), a recipe for a pickaxe might
specify two twigs and two flint as the materials necessary to create a
pickaxe. Just as objects such as twigs, flint and pickaxes can be virtually
possessed by a player, so too can recipes be possessed, where recipe
possession means that the player now possesses the knowledge to perform the
transformation from ingredients to produced object, typically represented
within the game by providing this transformation as a new player action.

The Recipe Definition dimension refers to the flexibility of the ingredients
used as input to the crafting process. At one extreme is the strongly
defined recipe which dictates recipe ingredients precisely,
leaving no room for customization or choice in ingredient specifics. This
provides less control for the player, but greater control to the game
creator, who can explicitly enumerate all possible craftable objects. At the
other extreme are crafting systems with undefined recipes. Such
systems use an underlying simulation to determine what happens when objects
are combined to create a new object. By not enforcing specific ingredient
combinations, this opens more possibilities for experimental and creative
play, but reduces the game creators’ control over crafting. Between these
two extremes are recipes with some predefined structure that support
variability in input ingredients and the resulting created object.

Strongly Defined Recipes

Crafting systems which only support crafting by strict recipe sit at the
high end of this dimension. These recipe-based crafting systems
effectively force players to follow predetermined links between input
and output to craft anything. Strongly defined recipes are so pervasive
in games that such systems are more commonly called
"crafting" by game designers [Naasz 2013]
[Steinke 2015], player communities [Item Crafting 2017], games journalists [Frank 2016], and in-game terminology (Minecraft) than the freeform crafting of undefined recipes.

Don’t Starve has several crafting systems,
including item crafting, crockpot cooking, and structure placement,
which fall at different positions on this spectrum. But the one the game
itself calls "crafting" (via in-game text), is a
classic example of a strongly defined recipe-based system (Figure 3).
For example, to make a pickaxe, the player needs two twigs and two flint
in their inventory, opens the tools crafting menu, selects the pickaxe
icon, and clicks "build." The player similarly clicks
on other object icons and their “build” buttons to make torches, traps,
top hats, crock pots, etc.

Figure 3.

Crafting items and tools like pickaxes in Don’t Starve involves selecting from a library of
completely defined recipes.

The recipe for an item never changes, and never allows a range of
possible resources to fulfill a single ingredient requirement. These
recipes also never vary in their output. If the player selects and
"builds" the "pickaxe," she
will inescapably have two twigs and two flint removed from their
inventory and replaced with a pickaxe. There’s no notion of
contextualized raw ingredients, of different kinds or shapes of wood or
stone, perhaps from different parts of the virtual world, which might
otherwise be visible in the texture and quality of a pickaxe they were
used to create. A crafted pickaxe also isn’t changed by random dice
rolls, or by the experience, handiness, or personality of the player or
player-character. A pickaxe, or any other item the player makes in
Don’t Starve, is the same, whether
crafted by a full, healthy, lucid adventurer, or one delirious from
hunger and monster attacks.

From a designer’s perspective, limiting the otherwise large possibility
spaces (as strongly defined recipes do) is practical, both reducing
development complexity and tightening authorial control over a player’s
experience. Strongly defined recipes have an analog to
node-and-link-based hypertext, especially when the result is at first
unknown to the player. Performing a crafting action using the recipe is
like traversing a hypertext link, where the source text is the set of
input ingredients, and the destination text is the output of crafting.
That the two "texts" are connected by a
"crafting" relationship signals a
"part-of" or "transformation"
relationship to the player. While many existing games use these links
functionally, they could just as easily be made more lyrical and
interpretive, in the sense of Susana Tosca’s lyrical links
[Tosca 2000].

When the individual recipes of a virtual world are considered together,
they can describe the logic and conceptual makeup of the fictional world
and its inhabitants. Many of the recipes in fantasy RPGs like World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and Dragon Age are
composed of found materials like herbs, minerals, and animal fur, which
are transformed into items you’d expect from Medieval European
craftspeople. Ingredients in No Man’s Sky
recipes are often atomic elements or alien machinery, which are
transformed into science fiction space-travel technology. The
ingredients of strongly defined recipes tell the player how their
character understands and acts in the fictional world.

Furthermore, the most important of the strongly defined recipes of a game
are often revisited many times during play, and thus solidified in
players’ minds and Wiki pages. This recipe-learning through repetition
can solidify the meaningful connections of strongly defined recipes, and
cause players to see the game world through the subjective lens of their
fictional avatars.

Parametric Recipes

Crafting according to a semi-defined recipe links multiple ingredient
sets to the same output, or links a given set of input components to
multiple possible results. We call both patterns parametric recipes, or recipes that take parameters of
input ingredients. In both cases the player has some options in enacting
a recipe, either by being able to choose among multiple sets of
ingredients to produce a given object in the first case, or in being
able to produce multiple objects given a set of ingredients in the
second.

An example of parametric recipes is the Don’t
Starve crockpot cooking system. The crockpot is a crafted
structure placed in the world, which itself is a crafting station for
producing food items. The player navigates to it, clicks on it, fills
the four available slots with individual ingredients, clicks
"cook," and waits for the result to appear in the
pot. Crockpot cooking is recipe-based because each combination of four
ingredients placed in the slots is linked to an output according to
hand-authored connections (where order of the four ingredients doesn’t
matter), but the recipes are templated. Each one allows multiple
different ingredient combinations for the same output. For example, the
Stuffed Eggplant recipe calls for one eggplant, one vegetable food item,
and two fillers (Figure 4). The eggplant requirement can be fulfilled by
two different single items (eggplant and cooked eggplant), and the
vegetable and filler can be fulfilled by 25 and 52 different items,
respectively. In effect, Stuffed Eggplant can be produced in 2x25x52x52
= 135,200 different ways.

Figure 4.

The parameterized recipe for Stuffed Eggplant in Don’t Starve’s crockpot system, as shared
on the player-run Don’t Starve Wikia
page (dontstarve.wikia.com/wiki/Stuffed_Eggplant). The second
box indicates "vegetable," and the question marks
indicate "filler."

Though the dish is the same, whether made with twigs as
filler or with meat, the space of possible input gives the player
potentially interesting choices to make in enacting the recipe. She can
execute the recipe strategically, using the most widely available or
lowest valued ingredients in the set of options. A strategic enactment
of Stuffed Eggplant would be to use twigs, a low-risk, readily
available, widespread resource in the world, before meat, which is
usually risky, rare, and more productively used in other recipes. And
the player can adapt her enactment according to what she has an
abundance of at the time. But she can also enact it in support of more
self-expressive play, which can be encouraged or discouraged by other
aspects of the game’s design and the context of crafting. For example,
the player can use less efficient ingredients even when there’s an
option to use others, if the less efficient ingredient suits their
specific play style or desired experience, particularly in terms of
role-playing, perceived realism, or exploration and experimentation (see
Player Expressiveness). Furthermore, defining a recipe as a space of
input, rather than a single possibility, changes the way the player
thinks about their crafting. The player can see resources in the world
as classes of ingredients connected by abstract properties, and,
similarly, interpret crafted entities as the union of abstract
properties that define their input parameters.

The second kind of parametric recipe is one which represents, rather than
ignores, the individuality of ingredients in an enacted recipe’s result.
There is still a space of possible input, like the multiple options of
many Don’t Starve crockpot recipes, but now
the choice among those options is represented in the output. Consider,
for example, the Minecraft pickaxe (Figure
5). The player arranges materials in the same, T-shaped graphical recipe
to craft any pickaxe in the game. The handle is always formed by two
vertical sticks, but the head can use several different kinds of blocks,
with the different materials contributing different strength and
durability values for the resulting pickaxe. The pickaxe recipe, in
effect, is parameterized by those materials. The pickaxe isn’t
completely defined; the player has room to enact the recipe in different
ways. But, unlike for Stuffed Eggplant, different ingredients produce
observable changes in the resulting item.

Figure 5.

A Minecraft pickaxe is always crafted
by the same, T-shaped graphical recipe, but many different materials
can be used to form the head, making it parametric. The material
parameters are carried through to the output in the form of its
strength and durability. Diamond pickaxes last for 1562 uses and can
mine all blocks, while wood pickaxes have durability 60 and can only
mine basic blocks.

Considering games as a "series of interesting decisions"
[Meier 2012], this kind of parametric recipe affords the player crafting
decisions which are arguably more interesting and impactful than the
previous form of parametric recipe. The decisions she makes in enacting
a recipe are visible and significant to gameplay as long as the crafted
item exists or is in some way simulated in the virtual world. A player’s
choices are made tangible in the very tools she uses, items she carries,
and structures she adds to the world.

As the constraints of a recipe are relaxed, the closer the experience of
following it resembles the freeform mode of creating described in the
next subsection. And the closer the crafting experience is to this
freeform, experimental mode, the greater the crafter’s agency and
expressive potential, the less the authorial control of the
recipe-writer, and the larger the impact of the player’s choices on the
output and player’s experience[10].

Systems with Undefined Recipes

Crafting systems without well-defined recipes sit at the low end of this
dimension. Instead of explicitly mapping specific crafting inputs to
specific outputs, these systems tend to specify rules by which a player
can craft, with the results determined by the interaction of those
rules. For example, Minecraft block
placement (different from the grid-based crafting used to craft a
pickaxe) allows players to attach solid cubical blocks to each other
along a three-dimensional grid, as long as there is another solid
surface in the world to attach them to.

Combining components without a recipe is more akin to real-world
art-making than real-world cookbook-following. A given set of components
may be combined in many different ways to produce many potential
results. There is not a hard-coded link from input to output but,
rather, a large space of possibility reachable from a given set of input
components. Players can create things that are individual and perhaps
even unique, if the possibility space is large enough. They can express
themselves through crafting; they can take actions and make choices that
not all—and sometimes not any—other players will make. Players can
create things that surprise even the developers. For instance, because
water can be poured into holes and is subject to abstract liquid
mechanics in Minecraft, players have
invented endless title pools that their avatars can ride in perpetually,
without movement input from the player (Figure 6). These "AFK
pools" have become popular ways to prevent servers from
automatically logging players off for extended idleness (AFK standing
for "Away from Keyboard"). In Terraria, obsidian farms and slime machines are often
crafted by players to automate particular resource gathering. Freeform
crafting systems often sustain large gaming communities of inventive
in-game crafting. This kind of inventive play is one of the primary
draws of games like Minecraft, Terraria, Besiege, SimCity, Kerbal Space Program, and Draw Something.

Especially in the AFK pool and obsidian farm examples, players are
inventively crafting with the mechanics of the larger game systems in
mind. One of the hallmark affordances of crafting in games is that
crafted output exists in a virtual world, interacting with the other
systems in the game to varying amounts (see Recognition of Outcome). It
becomes part of other game systems, influencing world variables and the
behaviors of other objects, while they, in turn, influence and act on
the crafted item. When Recognition of Outcome is high, players need an
understanding of the operations of the game system to be able to
intentionally control it through crafting. This understanding, described
by the SimCity Effect [Wardrip-Fruin 2009], is iteratively developed from player
expectations, experimentation, and observations during play. Freeform
crafting allows players to test and refine their expectations of system
behavior in a unique way, by making them material. Indeed, crafting in
systems with undefined recipes and high Recognition of
Outcome supports the player learning and iterative mental model-making
of the SimCity Effect.

Low recipe definition also allows for crafted objects with
individuality—that express aspects of the process and the person who
created them—a quality commonly valued in real-world crafts [Pye 1968]. Draw Something’s
drawing system is so freeform that the player is visible in what she
crafts, through her virtual brush strokes, art style, and chosen
subject. There is also great variation in how players draw the same item
for a friend to guess. And there are often unintended flaws, which means
that Draw Something supports the
workmanship of risk, as well as aesthetic diversity, in its virtual
crafting [Pye 1968]. This individuality is nearly
impossible for a player to express in a strongly defined recipe.

Players can improvisationally create within an undefined-recipe system,
but also share their inventions and borrow from others through social
venues external to the game. They essentially define their own recipes
that other players can follow, enabling the kind of socially embedded
creativity that is characteristic of real-world crafting communities
(see Social Aspects).

Fidelity of Action

One concept of psychology that game designers take advantage of in their
trade is the idea of affordance as the possibility of an action
on some other entity. Buttons beg to be pushed, and tea cups suggest being
held by their handle. Affordances[11] are a core component in leading a player to perform particular
actions within the game world: pickaxes are used for mining, and sewing
machines sew fabric. Fidelity of Action represents how detailed those
player-performed actions are within the game world, how accurate those
actions are to applicable real-life actions, and how embodied the player
performance of those actions is. We reiterate that there is no
moral judgement or criticism of a game’s design on how well or inaccurately
a game represents their chosen affordance.

Figure 7.

An illustrative example of Fidelity of Action using dancing as a
subject. The closer to dancing the game demands of the player, the more
physically demanding and nuanced the controls, the higher the system
would score.

As an example, consider the representation of knitting in games. In real
life, a knitter performing the craft uses manual dexterity to manipulate a
continuous thread on two sticks called needles, which produces a knit
fabric. The act of knitting has been represented in games in a wide range of
fidelity that stretch across this dimension. Knitting
Simulator 2014 is an example of extremely high fidelity to
knitting because it involves embodied knitting, the player physically
mimicking the act of a knitter, on custom game controllers consisting of
knitting needles with motion sensors. Each wiggle of the knitting needles
represents stitch progress in the game. A game with less fidelity in the
knitting genre would be Crafting Mama on the
3DS. Without any controllers representing the knitting needles, the player’s
embodied action while playing the game is tapping the stylus on the Nintendo
DS screen, which is further away from those in Knitting
Simulator 2014 and from real-life knitting. However, the player
does tap the screen rapidly to progress stitch-by-stitch, and in traditional
Mama fashion, she judges your performance
at the end, and you can even dress up Mama in your scarf. The knitting
mini-game in Crafting Mama is still very much
about the act of knitting. Games with the lowest amount of fidelity in their
crafts abstract away the process and leave nothing but a progress bar and/or
an end result. For example, a tailor in World of
Warcraft (WoW) makes fabric, using
nothing but fiber, at a click of a button. It could be a woven, knit, or
even felted fabric; the player’s character could be using knitting needles,
a loom, a crochet hook, or some other tool. We just don’t know. The fidelity
of fabric-creation in the case of WoW is
extremely low, so low that we cannot distinguish the process as
knitting.

The Applicability of Fidelity

Custom arcade machines, the Nintendo Wii system with its Wii-Mote and
Nunchaku, the Playstation Move and its Motion Controller, Microsoft’s
Kinect, and other games and systems with custom hardware such as Rock Band have all helped explore the space of
high-fidelity experiences. These experiences have so far focused
primarily on musical instruments, combat, or other physical tasks, such
as requiring accurate aiming with a "gun," slicing
with a "sword," or placing feet in dancing (Figure
7). Some crafts, such as knitting described previously, are also
physical. However, some crafts, and especially design activities and
planning, are not primarily performed via physical actions.

Accuracy of Abstractions

In SimCity (2013), where players craft a
city, is the player a mayor, an urban planner, or an urban engineer?
Real-life incarnations of these jobs cannot plop down miles of road
at a click of a button, or evict a neighborhood of high-class
citizens, rezone the district, and instantly create a casino in its
place. However, some aspects of the city such as traffic, pollution,
hospital access, and water and power systems are more deeply
simulated, and the management actions with respect to these city
aspects are higher fidelity. Thus the Fidelity of Action of SimCity is quite low in some cases, much
higher in others, and so we consider it to have a middling score for
this dimension as an average.

Completely Fictional Crafts

Some developers design a completely fictitious crafting system and/or
crafted items for their game’s mechanics, such as spells in CodeSpells or items in the Atelier series. In these cases, we judge
the fidelity of the crafting system’s process by the game’s
descriptions of that process, as well as player’s fidelity in
enacting those processes. We cannot compare the accuracy of the
outcome because there is not a real-life equivalent. In CodeSpells,[12] the player writes code to create spells for
their avatar to execute, including effects over time, changes to the
environment, and visual elements, such as particle effects. As the
game is made of code and exists by executing code, we determined
there was no greater fidelity for a digital fictional system other
than programming its behaviors.

In contrast, the Atelier series
describes the process of alchemy as partially physical. Alchemy, in
this case, is a fantastical incarnation of the real-life profession,
which involves mixing loosely related materials in a special
cauldron to produce everything from potions, baked goods, equipment,
and even living creatures. In Atelier
Totori, the protagonist is often shown learning how to
stir contents of an alchemy cauldron in a particular manner.
However, while each Atelier game
involves different alchemy minigames as the primary gameplay and
progression mechanic, none involve stirring or embodied action with
the cauldron. The player progresses through a series of menus,
managing ingredients, item properties, and alchemical skills, but
the player never learns the details of how the alchemist makes the
final product. While the process of alchemy is intricate in many
areas and offers extraordinary depth in its menus, it fails to fully
model all the aspects of the craft it created, and so the series is
slightly above average on the Fidelity dimension.

Completion Constraints

Everything that is required for an entity to be crafted is encapsulated
within this dimension. For the general crafting process, resources are
usually consumed, perhaps some tools are used (what we call required
components), and time passes to indicate the transformation of resources to
the end product. Sometimes a game might impose other restrictions on the
player, such as only being able to have two professions in World of Warcraft, what we discuss below under
miscellaneous constraints. While this paper does not address systems outside
of crafting, such as prerequisite resource-gathering, the use and
consumption of resources or tools heavily influences a player’s crafting
experience. Designers often use resources or recipes to gate
progression, require crafting stations to pace gameplay, or
consume player time as a function of gameplay.

The completion constraint categories are also problematic upon further
inspection: there are many systems that use no resources, some games with
legal tender that make differentiation between resources meaningless, and
the concept of time is not consistent between systems. Given the breadth of
systems and mechanics, the subjective difficulty of these constraints, and
the often compounding influence of these constraints due to crafting trees,
it became impossible to objectively compare the impact of the different
types of constraints between systems.

Instead, we largely took a quantitative approach of how many different types
of constraints were involved in the crafting process (resources, time,
location, and peripherals), with the presence of miscellaneous constraints
and the severity of the constraints nudging games that fell within the same
number.of types of constraints (Figure 8). For example, systems with
resources are more constrained than those that do not use resources, but
resource systems that have a legal tender that allows for resource trade are
less constrained than those resource systems without. In general, the higher
the score, the more disparate conditions the player must satisfy in order to
complete crafting.

Figure 8.

Our quantitative approach to this completion constraint dimension.
Each main constraint category (consumed resources, present resources,
time, and location) that was expressed by the system increased its
overall score by 25%. The score was then modified by 5-10% per
constraint if it was particularly lax or egregious (such as being a
movable or symbolic location or having a currency relaxing those
constraints), or if it had another notable constraint not captured by
the categories (a miscellaneous constraint). If the system in our graph
encapsulates multiple crafting systems with different scores, we average
their score and make note of it.

Consumed Resources

Games often deal with consumed resources—currency or materials players
acquire that can be spent in order to achieve certain goals in a game.
Consumed resources may also include the recipe itself as a blueprint
object and is actually consumed to craft an item (such as in EVE Online, Lichdom spellcrafting, or Wildstar gear crafting). Any prerequisite material with a
limited durability, in that some part or whole of the material is
removed or destroyed during crafting, counts as a consumed resource.
Thinking about games in terms of how these resources flow, how they are
acquired and spent, has a history in game analysis. For example,
Dorman’s Machinations is a way to describe
arbitrary game mechanics in terms of resource flows [Adams and Dormans 2012].

However, not all crafting systems have consumed resources. Knitting Simulator 2014, where the player goes
through the actions of knitting, does not consume any resource. Players
do not spend anything to make a new stitch. In general, when players
play with crafting systems in free-play modes (where they are presented
with an unlimited amount of resources that are always present), it
becomes challenging to consider crafting systems as only resource
transformation systems.

Present Resources

Materials or tools that are not consumed, but are still required to be
present in an inventory or game world, are considered present resources.
We bother with the distinction because present resources are a one-time
need that is more flexible than consumed resources. A jeweler’s kit is
required to be held by jewelcrafters in World of
Warcraft for them to create gems and jewelry, but so long as
they have that item, they can craft at any location in the world (Figure
12). While economies are often deeply integrated with consumed
resources, present resources, other than possibly first acquisition, are
separate from the influence of currency.

Once the player acquires access to a present resource, it often opens up
a whole new set of recipes in crafting
progression. For example, the hellforge is a crafting
station in Terraria that can only be found
in the underworld (but it can be picked up and carried back to the
player’s base). It can smelt some of the most powerful pre-hardmode
materials and can be used as a consumed resource to create the first
forge able to smelt hardmode metals, helping unlock two new tiers of
player strength. A crafting tree that combines consumed and present
resources for a Terraria item is shown in
Figure 9.

The constraint of present resources is kept separate from location
constraints because, as in Minecraft’s or
Terraria’s crafting stations, they can
sometimes be picked up and carried with the player, functionally
removing the location restriction that other systems may enforce.

Figure 9.

Marked up Terraria crafting tree for
an Ankh Shield. The parts of the tree highlighted in yellow are
consumed resources. The bookshelf-like parts of the tree highlighted
in pink are present resources that must be placed in the gameworld,
where the crafting actions must then be performed. In Terraria, some present resources are found
in the gameworld, others are the result of crafting themselves.
Original image distributed with the CC-BY-SA license, original attribution goes to the Wikia
user Juper0.

Time

Time is a complex topic in games. According to Zagal & Mateas, there
are four common temporal frames: real-world time (experienced in the
physical world), gameworld time (in-game time including events around
gameplay action), coordination time (coordination between player and
agents, such as navigating menus), and fictive time (acknowledged
sociocultural labels and event sequences) [Zagal and Mateas 2010].
Sometimes, crafting takes time in any of these temporal frames. This
slows down a player’s completion rate, either because crafting comprises
a game in and of itself which takes time to play, or players just need
to wait a certain amount of time before the crafting is finished (in
real-world time or gameworld time). However, not all time is created
equal. Some crafting delays take up all of the player’s focus and
ability to perform other tasks, while other delays are completely
idle.

In Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, a
player must spend time performing a sequence of crafting actions to
complete a craft, during which time the player cannot perform other
gameplay actions without abandoning the crafting sequence (Figure 15).
When romancing piñata animals in Viva
Piñata, the player has a skippable cutscene, but a
non-skippable minigame to play. Macro engines (discussed later in
Automation) allow a player to remain attentive of other things as the
performing of crafting actions is automated, but she still needs to wait
for crafting to complete. In the same vein, players cannot act while
waiting for a bar to fill to complete a craft in World of Warcraft, although this sort of delay does not
require intense player focus (Figure 10).

Figure 10.

In the Draenor World of Warcraft
expansion, Scribes used ink in large quantities, which would take
many minutes to make (15+ in this example). In the newest Legion expansion, Scribes use pigments
directly and skip this step.

Time, when considered this way, is a hard, unskippable constraint. Besiege does not have this constraint, because
the player can complete crafting her fantastical steampunk death machine
by just clicking go. Further, Besiege
starts players with a core ‘starting’ block, and considers this starting
block a valid, completed craft; thus, players do not have to make any
crafting decisions in any temporal frame in order to immediately begin
playing the game In contrast, in Final Fantasy XIV:
A Realm Reborn, the player must execute a series of
repetitive actions in order to fill a completion bar to create a craft
(Figure 15).

This is different from the time constraints in Pokémon[13] breeding. Time, as measured in the number of
steps the avatar has taken in the game world, is a large delay in
breeding a new Pokémon. Although the player is free to perform other
in-game tasks while she waits, time only passes—at least in relation to
waiting for pokémon to breed—when the player avatar moves.

Both these examples are different from how time is considered in Eve Online’s manufacturing system. Time in
Eve Online’s manufacturing system
heavily involves the real-world temporal frame and is directly tied to
the passage of real-world time outside the game—a manufacturing job is
measured in a number of minutes, hours or even days (Figure 11). A
player does not have to be playing the game for that entire amount of
time. Progress on completing the manufacturing job happens regardless of
the player being logged in.

Figure 11.

This is a screenshot of an Eve Online
crafting calculator (accessed at http://www.eve-cost.eu/calculator). Time taken to craft
an item is highlighted in yellow, showing the massive (for virtual
crafting) timescales at play with crafting in Eve. The highlighted
portion on the right is the time for all the runs to finish; the
highlighted portion on the left is for a single ship to be created.
At such large timescales, it makes sense to use the passage of real
time, rather than just time when the player is actively playing or a
proxy for time like steps taken.

Location

Typically, only a concern when a player is embodied, some games require a
player to be in a particular gameworld location to craft items. Not all
locations serve as meaningful completion constraints, however. Kerbal Space Program has specialized hangers
where a player builds rocket ships and space planes, but a player can
snap to these locations at any time (even in the middle of a rocket
launch). Thus, they provide a thematic frame for construction
(construction happens in hangars), but don’t introduce an actual
gameplay constraint within the crafting system. Systems that include
more thematic and less functional location constraints receive a smaller
score than those with immobile, hard location constraints. Examples of
gameplay location constraints include workbenches in Minecraft, cooking fires in World of Warcraft (Figure 12), or the
non-player character (NPC) craftspeople a player visits to craft
weapons, armor, or gems in Diablo III.

Figure 12.

Certain items, such as this Juicy Bear Burger in World of Warcraft, need to be created at a
cooking fire, which is a present resource constraint. Cooking fires
exist in certain spots in the world, forming a location constraint
on where Juicy Bear Burgers can be created. However, players can
also generate cooking fires, loosening the location constraint as
compared to a forge, which are not mobile. An example of a present
resource that has no physical location is the Jeweler’s Kit, which
must be carried in the player’s inventory.

It is important to note that locations can also represent available land
for construction, in games where the player is crafting some physical
space (e.g., creating a pond or fencing in a garden space in a Viva Piñata garden). Although the player isn’t
really embodied in Viva Piñata, she still
needs to maneuver the camera to an unoccupied place in the game world
before being able to complete a crafting step of planting tree or
building a fence.

Miscellaneous Constraints

In addition to consumed resources, present resources, time, and location,
there are other miscellaneous constraints that are occasionally used in
crafting systems. For example, in World of
Warcraft, player characters are limited to two professions;
each profession limits what the character can and cannot craft. Some
professions have further specializations, such as World of Warcraft engineers being able to choose between
gnomish or goblin engineering. To get around this constraint, players
often have more than one character, each with a different set of
professions. These alternate characters (alts for short) allow players
to maximize their crafting output [Consalvo 2009, 413]. But time, location and resources account for the vast majority of
constraints found in crafting systems.

Variable Outcome

Crafting systems are not always deterministic paths representable by a
crafting tree. Two players can have the same tools, have the same resources,
be at the same location, take identical actions, and still end up with two different results. We refer to this
randomness as Variable Outcome.

Variable Outcome is not the same as having visible variables in a crafting
system. Rather, fixed or random variables may be hidden from the player;
this requires a player to explore the system in order to unveil the rules
under which the gameworld operates. Players may develop a
"feel" for the values a stochastic variable may take.
Crafting systems often allow players to manipulate the probability
distributions of their random variables, increasing the odds that they will
get the outcome they want. For example, in World of
Warcraft, whether or not crafting a particular recipe will help
level up a crafting stat is random. However, certain recipes at a given
cooking skill have a higher probability to give further stat increases and
are color coded to show this to the player (Figure 13). By only crafting
particularly colored recipes, the player is putting a thumb on the
"increase crafting stat" variable and pushing it in
her favor.

Figure 13.

A screenshot of the player’s cookbook in World of
Warcraft. Each recipe a player knows is highlighted in a
different color, which relates to the odds that preparing that recipe
will increase the player’s crafting skill (in this case, cooking skill).
Recipes highlighted yellow give a medium chance of increasing the
cooking skill. The screenshot shows how each instance of crafting does
not necessarily increase the skill: orange recipes guarantee skill
increase, green recipes indicate a low chance of skill increase, while
gray recipes guarantee zero skill increase.

Randomness in a crafting outcome can sometimes include a complete failure to
craft, or randomly assign properties to a completed item. An item can be of
better or worse quality. Or the process may refund a variable amount of
resources back to the crafter upon completion.

A common paradigm for games is to randomly apply some extra properties to a
crafted item, with some of them being negative. Each act of crafting always
produces something, but it might not be exactly what the player is looking
for.

For example, when crafting a new weapon in Terraria, players combine various resources at a particular
location in the game world. Part of this is deterministic; players will
always get a particular weapon with certain default characteristics.
However, the weapon also gets a random modifier that is outside the player’s
control. This modifier can impact the effectiveness and utility of the
weapon at hand, shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14.

The strongly defined recipe Wooden Sword from Terraria produces a sword with default properties. These
properties are potentially changed by random modifiers. In these two
examples, we see the “Legendary” modifier increasing the damage and
effectiveness of the sword, while “Shameful” decreases its damage and
its ability to keep enemies away from the player but still increases the
sword’s size

There is no way to control the random selection of a modifier; a player
cannot make particular modifiers more or less likely. Terraria does allow for a player to reroll a modifier after a
weapon has been created as many times as she likes until she happens on the
desired one. For variable outcome, this is a common design choice—if a
player can’t have control over an aspect of crafting, at least she can retry
somewhat easily in order to find the values she wants.

Variable Outcome is Uncommon

Variable outcome is not particularly common, especially in systems built
for simulation. Most of the crafting systems analyzed do not have any
variable outcome. The spaceship manufacturing in Kerbal Space Program is typical of the common case of
completely deterministic crafting. Players have complete control over
how the parts are placed on their spaceship, and how those parts will
function. The player has absolute control over the form and function of
each new spacecraft she creates. This helps reveal the underlying rules
of the world to players via the crafting system. It is more difficult
for players to form a mental model of the crafting system when it
contains hidden variables or is intrinsically stochastic.

Variable Outcome in the Real World

Linking variable outcome back to real life crafting, it intuitively feels
like a proxy for the random forces that impact successfully completing a
craft in real life. Think of the random forces that impact successfully
making a dish in a kitchen—a cook can accidentally add too much of an
ingredient at a particular time, grab the wrong spice, or have the lid
of the spice container come off while shaking some into the dish.
However, Variable Outcome in game crafting systems leads to different
effects than the variability in real life crafting.

In the Workmanship of Risk (see Aesthetic
Diversity), Pye argues at length about the virtues of workmanship and
how it relates to design. Items created with unregulated or free
workmanship often look very different from each other, but can serve the
same functional purposes. In addition, they can be of the same quality,
even if they look very different. This kind of variability relates to
the improvisational skill of the craftsperson given the dynamic richness
of real-world situations. In contrast, variable outcome in game crafting
systems often works against Pye’s dream of aesthetic variability. Given
the stochastic modeling of object attributes typical in crafting systems
with variable outcome, the results are often not functionally
equivalent—they vary along attributes with gameplay significance, making
one crafted object clearly superior to the other.

Either due to internal motivation, social pressures, or
other forces such as gameplay thresholds, players often look for optimal
items. These players grind until they get the optimal bit of gear,
repeating the crafting attempt as many times as it takes until the
outcome lines up with their definition of optimal. Variable outcome, in
this case, doesn’t actually improve the aesthetic diversity of various
crafted items in games.

This actually makes variable outcome, in the games we analyzed, a poor
proxy for the random forces that impact real-world crafting. A missed
stitch, awkward tension, or a flaw in the yarn does not meaningfully
change how warm a sweater is. However, this type of improvisational
variability that free workmanship has been under-explored in crafting
systems and is a rich future direction for crafting system design.

Progression with Randomness

Gaining influence over a random variable is a way to add progression into
a crafting system, which sometimes ties this dimension to
Progression. As players progress in the game (sometimes
within the crafting system, and sometimes as part of a different
system), players may get new ways to view the random variables at play
or the ability to narrow the ranges on the random variables.

This is one of the primary ways players progress in the crafting system
of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
(FFXIV). FFXIV’s crafting system is complex, giving the player a
range of crafting actions that are abstractions over ideas and concepts
that ground out in real-world crafting (e.g. "Precise
Touch", "Muscle Memory"). Some of these
skills fill up a progress bar, and when the bar is full, the item is
created (see Figure 15).

Figure 15.

The progress window for an item during the crafting sequence from
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn,
and a snippet of the crafting details relayed to the player in their
chat log. The player uses crafting actions, such as the shown ‘Basic
Touch’ and ‘Careful Synthesis’ to alter the progress, quality,
durability, condition, and chance for high quality (HQ) outcome.
Note that in the chat log these crafting actions succeed, but some
actions have a chance of failure. There are three possible outcomes:
failure (via 0 durability without a full progress bar, or quitting),
success, and HQ success.

However, in Figure 15 we can see items also have a running durability
score, which represents how many more actions can be performed before
the crafting is forcibly resolved. Finally, there is a quality bar,
which is the chance that, when the craft is completed, the item produced
will be of high quality (better in terms of stats). In addition,
randomly, the next action taken can be flagged as excellent, good,
normal or poor, which impacts the rate at which the progress and quality
bars fill. This random action bonus or penalty is referred to as the
action’s condition.

Starting crafters in FFXIV are at the mercy
of conditions—without a few lucky successful actions while avoiding an
unlucky failure, the progress bar cannot be filled and the craft fails.
However, as players progress, they unlock more crafting skills which
gives them more control over the crafting process. A ‘poor’ condition
becomes less of a setback, an ‘excellent’ condition can be capitalized
on. Likewise with the quality bar—at the start, players have very few
ways of filling the quality bar, or can fill it, but at the expense of
being able to fill the progress bar. As players progress, filling the
quality bar becomes more feasible, and players can more consistently
create items of high quality. This mastery of randomness is pleasing and
powerful, and one case study into how Progression can work in a crafting
system.

Recipe Definition with Randomness

While attempting to visualize the range of inputs that could be part of
the Recipe Definition, Completion Constraints, and how they related to
the variability of the outcome, we created Figure 16.

Figure 16.

A generic summary of the relationship between crafting inputs and
outputs, combining the concepts of different types of defined
recipes, crafting inputs, player intention/design, and variable
outcome. The left-hand circles start with strongly defined recipes
and represent less and less defined recipes as the examples progress
(their circles get bigger, representing a greater space of potential
inputs). The right-hand outcome circles show that either the output
results in a determined output (not variable), or a range of
outputs, small or large, that result from some amount of
variability. The bottom half of the diagram expands on what could be
involved in crafting inputs: some amount of materials (completion
constraints), the crafting process, and (optionally) an implicit or
explicit plan to make or use the materials or output in a different
context.

System Recognition of Outcome

System Recognition of Outcome refers to the manner and degree to which a
larger game system models and represents the results of crafting. This is
the reinforcement after player’s crafting actions by which players know that
they have crafted something; that something new exists in the virtual world
as a result of their decision-making and actions. System recognition ranges
from one-time, immediate graphical or textual acknowledgement, to complex
behavioral modeling of the crafted item over time.

The level of system recognition of a crafting system may be estimated by
answering these questions, adapted for crafting from Chris Crawford’s
listen-think-speak definition of interactivity [Crawford 2003].

How many properties of the resource constraints and crafted output
does the system use to impact future game actions?

How much processing, or transformation, does the player perceive to be
carried out on those properties? Do those properties change the final
product or how the final product interacts with the greater game
systems?

How deeply is the output of crafting represented to the player? Can
the player perceive the transformation by some textual, graphical, or
other signal expressed by the final product?

These questions culminate in how well a crafting system (1) listens to, (2)
thinks about, and (3) speaks about what a player is crafting
and has crafted. In Crawford’s terms, it is how well the system holds up its
end of the conversation with the player, after the player has
"spoken." In this case, the player spoke through
crafting actions, and the focus of conversation is on what the player has
crafted. If the system looks at few properties of the output, processes them
minimally or not at all, and presents that minimal processing directly,
without impacting other game systems, it is considered to have low system
recognition of outcome. If the system uses many properties of crafting
output, connecting crafting output to non-trivial functions and other game
systems, and presents a transformed representation and cascading
consequences of the output back to the player, it has high system
recognition.

Low Recognition

Among the lowest modes of recognizing player crafting is by direct,
one-time acknowledgement by static text or image. In Kittens Game, crafting a stone slab results in
a slab counter in a list of many other counters quietly increasing, or a
new counter quietly appearing if it hasn’t been crafted before (Figure
17). Such counter-based representation of crafting, in which the sole
purpose of crafting objects is to increment counters which then serve as
resources for crafting other objects (which are themselves just
counters), is typical of the idle games (or incremental games) genre
[Khaliq and Purkiss 2015]
[Deterding 2016].

The system uses for recognition only a single property of a
crafted item: that the item now exists. It doesn’t need any other
information about that item.

The only processing over that single property is the incrementing
of a numerical inventory count of identical items that existed
previously. In the context of gameplay action, the system propagates
the consequence of that changed numerical value to other relevant
systems (such as trade).

The only direct representation of the output is a changed textual
counter.

The indirect representation of output through other game
systems pushes Kittens Game’s crafting
model higher than its otherwise minimal position on this dimension. It
further recognizes player-crafted items by modeling them as ingredients
in future crafting recipes, and as inputs to the game’s economy, as
goods that can be sold or traded.

Figure 17.

Crafting outcomes in Kittens Game are
recognized through minimal text representation and as input to
future crafting and economic actions.

Medium Recognition

Contrast this representation with crafting whose output is given physical
manifestation in the gameworld, beyond an inventory abstraction. In
Minecraft crafting (versus block
placement), many craftable items exist as icons in inventory slots, but
may also be placed in the world or held and used by the player
character. When a pickaxe is crafted, it appears as a static, 2D icon in
the inventory menu, that may be dragged and dropped into different slots
of a grid. It may then be selected to be equipped, at which point its
3D, voxel representation is visible in the player character’s hand as
she moves about the world. With pickaxe equipped, the player can click
on blocks in the world, causing the pickaxe’s 3D model to move and
rotate with the avatar’s arm, as if being swung. Each click and swing
causes cracks to appear on the clicked block, growing more pronounced
with each swing, until finally bursting into collectible resources if
the pickaxe was crafted with a strong enough metal. Besides the
all-important pickaxe, Minecraft crafting
supports the creation of other equipable tools, weapons, armor, and
several classes of placeable blocks and vehicles.

Minecraft easily has deeper recognition of
crafting outcomes than Kittens Game, but less
than games which, for instance, apply and visualize detailed physics
simulations. We analyze this already complex middle case as follows:

The Minecraft crafting system
recognizes several properties of its crafted items: item category
(e.g., pickaxe, sword, wood plank) and several classes of
ingredients, which are different for different item categories
(e.g., for pickaxes, axes, and swords, the metal used matters; for
wood planks, the kind of wood blocks used matters).

The system-observed properties of the crafted items are
transformed and processed only slightly: for stackable items, an
inventory counter is increased, and for items with quality, that
quality is compared to the quality of an action target to determine
the action’s outcome. When the player uses these different items,
their properties are used in determining action outcomes (e.g., if
mining with a crafted pickaxe, a block can burst into
resources).

The crafted items are modeled as moveable graphical icons in a
gridded inventory space, as 3D-modeled objects in the world. The
material composition (and thus strength) of the item is ‘spoken’ to
the player as different-colored versions of the same item
corresponding to the color of the material.

High Recognition

At the highest end of this spectrum are games which save a lot of
information about how an item is crafted and use that information as
input to a simulation, which applies functions or rules to transform
that saved information, and whose behavior may be observed during play.
Such simulation-based crafting recognition games include
Besiege, Kerbal
Space Program, SimCity, CodeSpells, and Spore’s character creation.

In Besiege, players craft hyper-destructive
siege machines from a large pallet of combinable engine parts, including
beams, springs, flame-throwers, and motorized wheels. The resulting
objects often look like they could be Medieval European war technology,
but are crafted from atomic parts with a large space of potential
combination. Players regularly create mechanisms never used in
historical European warfare and that are in fact completely new to
Besiege and its online community.

In Besiege, recognized properties of
a crafted item consist of its types of component pieces (e.g.,
beams, springs, wheels), and how those pieces are arranged relative
to each other in a 3D space (e.g., this particular beam is connected
to this wheel in this orientation). The game system represents many
physical properties of the constructed entity, excluding only
information such as the exact sequence of actions or time the player
took to construct it.

The recognized properties are transformed by putting their
representation through Besiege’s
stylized physics simulation. X- and y-positions of engine parts are
modified by gravity, collision with other solid objects, input
controls, and the behavior of connected parts and the type of
connection.

The crafted item is well represented to the player. When the
player completes a siege machine, they can press a key or button to
"play" the scenario, which exits build mode,
begins applying the physics engine to the machine as it is
represented graphically, enables keyboard-controllable pieces to be
controlled, and initiates the movement and targeting of tiny,
defending NPC knights and archers toward the newly minted death
machine.

Patterns of System Recognition

In games like Besiege, with particularly
high outcome recognition, the core loop often emphasizes it via a
separate, watch-it-run or simulation phase, following the crafting.
Often, the phase makes the crafted item more traditionally playable,
with movement-control or other minimal interactivity. True also of
Kerbal Space Program, Incredipede, and Spore character creation, this affords the player the
unique pleasure of seeing her creations theatrically come to life, in a
performative reveal after a suspense-building crafting period. The
player creates with an idea of what will happen, runs the simulation and
inevitably finds her idea only partially correct, but in an
understandable way, so that her idea of what will happen is updated to
reflect a better understanding of the simulation. Her updated mental
model is immediately actionable in the next crafting phase. The
game-internal core loop is neatly translatable to the player-internal
iterative model-making loop of the SimCity
Effect [Wardrip-Fruin 2009]. Further,
"live" recognition, that happens in real time,
both as the item is crafted and afterward, as with Minecraft block placement, supports player embodiment as a
character in the virtual world, and is more commonly integrated with
larger gameplay experiences that aren’t focused primarily on crafting.
Furthermore, systems high on outcome recognition and low on recipe
definition generally support the SimCity
Effect (named for a live crafting system), regardless of the presence of
a detached watch-it-run phase after crafting.

Other patterns of system recognition include graphical modeling and
physics simulation (e.g., gravity, collision, fluid physics), impact on
a stats system (combat, character progression, NPC relationships), and
adjacency bonuses in base or city-building (e.g. building a Theatre
District next to a Natural Wonder in Civilization
6 produces bonus culture). All of these can vary on system
recognition by how flat or complex the model is.

Another interesting pattern is the use of outcome recognition to identify
conditions-based recipes in an otherwise undefined recipe system. In
Terraria, houses can be built for NPCs
using the general block-placement system, anywhere in the large sandbox
world. But NPCs will only become residents if particular requirements
are met: blocks are placed to form a fully enclosed structure, with at
least one entrance, covering at least 60 total tiles, but less than 750,
containing at least one valid light source, flat surface item, and
comfort item. The system will check for player structures which satisfy
this after crafting, rather than impose the
requirements before the structure can be built at all, as in strongly
defined recipe crafting. This pattern is also visible in the gardening
of Viva Piñata, in which specific clusters
of player-placed items and piñata residents in a garden entice other
piñatas to visit and become residents. This style of recognition enables
both the creative experimentation and expression of freeform crafting as
well as the authorial control of predefined recipes. When players
discover these implicit recipes, without having looked them up or known
about them beforehand, this style of system recognition can be a
delightful and surprising meeting of minds between the player and
system.

Games with undefined recipes often have high system recognition, as with
Besiege, Kerbal
Space Program, and Minecraft
block placement, but this is not always the case. Draw Something has no recipes, yet low system recognition
of the player-created drawings. The system doesn’t listen and respond to
player input beyond presenting the drawing on the screen as it was
drawn. Instead, the finished drawings are recognized by a human partner,
in an association game paradigm similar to Pictionary or charades. Player-recognized crafting is not
mapped by this dimension, yet features importantly in Player
Expressiveness.

Player Expressiveness

The dimension of player expressiveness captures the range of reasonable
actions and outcomes within a crafting system suggested by the domain of the
game world. "Expressiveness" is a somewhat vague term, as
is "creativity" (See Craft and Creativity), but this
dimension focuses on the amount of reasonable choice the player has, given
the game’s setting and the tools provided to them, during the process of
crafting. This dimension is not trying to capture players explicitly
subverting or exploiting a crafting system, as might occur in counter-play.
Further, this dimension is not about the process of choosing what to craft,
nor about the uses of the item after being made. For example, this dimension
is about the process of customization and sewing of a shirt, not about
choosing to wear the shirt (because it may be pretty or powerful), nor about
how to dye, alter, or equip the shirt in a different crafting system after
being completed. In short, we are ignoring the infinite combinatorial
influences of outside systems as much as possible, but we acknowledge that
an outside influence can inspire creative action or exploration. We do not
care where inspiration comes from; this dimension only measures whether or
not the player can express her inspiration successfully.

For example, in Draw Something, the player is
given a one-word prompt to draw, and she is victorious if the other player
guesses her prompt successfully. The player is free to draw anything she
likes in a rainbow of colors, whether or not it supports the prompt. The
user may draw an expansive beach scene, put Batman lounging in a beach chair
with a coconut drink complete with tiny umbrella, and point to the little
straw in the cup for the prompt “straw.” While the brushes and drawing tools
are extremely basic, players can use fingertips or a stylus to be as
creative as they like or spend as much time on a drawing as they desire, and
this results in extremely high player expressiveness.

In Neko Atsume, a game of
"gardening" cats via putting down enticing furniture,
players don’t have the ability to pet, adopt, customize, or directly
interact with the cats, which are common actions players may want to do with
real or virtual cats. There is a lack of fulfillment of player desires in
customizing their homes or interacting with their cultivated garden of
adorable felines, which results in lower player expressiveness. A game world
that suggests many creative options without offering the ability to
capitalize on them has the lowest level of Player Expressiveness. For
example, Knitting Simulator 2014, which
emulates knitting extremely well, offers no ability to change, adjust, or
customize yarn color, pattern, or stitches. All of the creative choice a
crafter has when knitting is absent. The mechanics of the game distill down
to a progress bar, leaving no space for player agency and no support for
player choice. In the terms of Mateas, this would be called an imbalance of
material affordances (reasonable player desire) and formal affordances (game
system support) [Mateas 2001], expanded in [Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009]. In these examples, we show that high
player expressiveness is a combination of a creative domain or space that
begs for customization, as well as mechanical support for the player to
create within that space.

Subversive Play

In real-life situations including games, open-ended play, or law, many
humans have cheated, found loop-holes, and otherwise circumvented the
rules or intended purpose of rules. Often, cheating leads to avoiding or
skipping game challenges by amassing experience, automatically aiming at
critical targets, or having unlimited health or lives. However, a subset
of creative players cheat or find alternative modes of play within a
given arena. Game scholars call these activities
"critical" or "subversive"
play [Flanagan 2009]. Game developers can try their
hardest to snuff out cheaters, and often do in competitive games such as
Overwatch or DOTA, where one player’s cheating harms the play experience
for another real-life human. Other developers may embrace and attempt to
support subversive play, such as Will Wright, creator of the Sims and a
fan of attaching toys to rockets [Totilo 2010]. The
"motherlode" debug code, which grants the player
a large sum of in-game currency, has existed in nearly every Sims game since Sims
II. The Sims series of games
has many interesting opportunities for subversive play, such as
torturing and killing sims in countless ways, flirting with Death, and
having babies with aliens [Reddit 2015]. Since choosing to
play subversively is a direct choice of the player’s, and a developer’s
support of those choices enables players to explore new and creative
experiences, games that explicitly support subversive play have
increased player expressiveness. This is distinct from
unsupported subversive play, which, as we say above, we do not count
towards player expressiveness in our analysis. There are very few
examples of these games, however, and this is a rich area of potential
future exploration.

Resources and Recipes

Different materials and recipes often spark new ideas or give avenues for
fresh inspiration and methods of crafting. For example, many players of
Minecraft do not immediately recognize
that the positions of materials in the 2x2 and 3x3 crafting grids
(discussed previously in Strongly Defined Recipes and Figures 5 &
19) are meaningful. However, once the player discovers this fact, if she
doesn’t already know the other recipes, there is an immediate suggested
course of action discovered within the crafting grid. Regarding Minecraft’s other primary crafting system of
block placement, different block materials can help crafters better
suggest form in their low-resolution sculptures or apply other forms of
art, such as pixel graphics. Not only do users have the range of
naturally occurring material, such as stone or wood, but they can dye
wool in a range of 16 colors. If we examine character customization in
Minecraft, we also see that those 16
colors can be mixed or overdyed to create 12,326,391 colors[14].

Progression

Progression addresses the experience of interacting with the crafting system
over time. Games that read higher on this dimension, such as those with deep
crafting prerequisite trees or the leveling up of avatar crafting skills,
afford a greater sense of growth and development. A crafting system with no
system-underwritten progression allows any of the system’s recipes or
combination mechanisms to be engaged at any time during play, which enables
more player self-direction and freeform experimentation.

This dimension is highly related to player skill at a particular crafting
system. Crafting systems can be difficult, such as the complex calculations
that go into a successful ship for Kerbal Space
Program, or the planning and architectural design for large
Minecraft creations. As people engage with
the game systems, they master them, being able to better direct them towards
a particular goal. However, this sort of progression is highly dependent on
the person playing the crafting system rather than properties in the system
itself. For example, a rocket engineer may build a successful ship in Kerbalvfar more quickly than the average player.
Therefore, this dimension avoids addressing player skill and instead focuses
on how the crafting system itself supports growth and development through
engagement.

We identified five types of progression in crafting systems: leveling
(improving an abstraction for crafting skill), resource unlocking (getting
new resources to use), recipe unlocking (finding new recipes), prerequisite
crafting (needing to craft something before being able to craft something
else), and mechanics changes (new ways to craft things).

Leveling

This type of progression is related to increasing the player-character’s
crafting skill. Most commonly, crafting skill is represented as an
abstract number, and increasing this number is interpreted as an avatar
becoming more skilled at a craft. Not all forms of leveling in a game
pertain to crafting, or are relevant to crafting progression. In Skyrim, the player has many different stats to
level that are abstractions over the avatar’s skill in a variety of
domains. Leveling up combat-focused skills (like one-handed weapon
combat) does not impact the player’s ability to craft in any way, while
certain skills in Skyrim are centered
around crafting (e.g., smithing).

There is another, less explicit form of crafting leveling. When looking
at games like Katamari Damacy in terms of
crafting, a player progresses through levels by building balls, called
katamaris, to a certain size or with specific types of items. Because
the level requirements of the player’s katamari get more and more
demanding, moving from level to level works as a form of crafting
leveling, unlocking new resources to use in katamaris as well as
proposing new recipes. The player may not think to make a katamari
almost solely of school supplies, but the level requirements force the
player to make conscious choices on what to pick up with their katamari.
NPCs may comment, as a player moves into later levels or overshoots the
level’s requirement, that their avatar is becoming a better and better
crafter, still feeding into the core idea of development and growth that
is important to this part of this dimension.

Implicit or Explicit Resource Unlocking

Progression through a crafting system can work in more ways than
increasing an abstraction for skill. Another common mechanism is
revealing new resources for a player to use. These reveals can be
explicit: a single flag that must be flipped or a condition that must be
satisfied in order to reveal new resources. Often, the revealing
condition will be brought to the player’s attention, or the unveiling of
a new resource will be announced to the player when it is available.

In other games, such as Minecraft, this
happens implicitly by virtue of world building or level design. As
players play Minecraft, they explore the
world primarily by digging down through it. It takes tools built from
rarer, deeper resources to dig through tougher, deeper kinds of rock.
This is an implicit resource unlock—there is no flag that must be
flipped by getting to a particular level or finishing a quest in order
to unveil new kinds of ore to mine.[15] Instead, there is a natural barrier that can be overcome
in a variety of ways, all of which require some time spent interacting
with the game world. This natural progression through strata of the game
world is systematically enforced through properties of the procedural
content generator that generates Minecraft worlds.

Implicit or Explicit Recipe Unlocking

Just like resources can be explicitly or implicitly locked, so can
particular recipes for crafting. This concept ties in heavily with the
Recipe Definition dimension, as a game needs to have semi-defined or
strongly defined recipes in order to unlock them. Explicitly locked
recipes might be quest rewards, or given to the player if she achieves a
certain level. Games that have implicit recipe unlocking may randomly
distribute their recipes throughout the game world (like No Man’s Sky, see Figure 18). There is nothing
the game explicitly asks the player to do to unlock a particular recipe,
outside of interacting with and exploring the game world.

Figure 18.

A player picking up a new recipe in No Man’s
Sky. These recipes are scattered throughout the galaxy,
requiring a player to explore the galaxy however she sees fit to
unlock them.

This is also common in idle or incremental game crafting [Khaliq and Purkiss 2015]
[Deterding 2016], and it may be explicit or implicit. New
recipes in incremental games often appear as new buttons (new ways to
convert resources) or tabs (entire banks of new buttons or existing
functionality on old buttons). Some recipes may be implicitly unlocked
by just spending a certain amount of time with the incremental game,
while others are explicitly locked with a certain amount and combination
of resources required.

Prerequisite Crafting

Prerequisite crafting is when there is an explicit requirement for
something to be crafted before something else can be crafted. This is
the type of progression in crafting trees, which are long chains of
prerequisite objects that usually terminate in a single item. A good
example of this are the crafting trees of Terraria, which often have players crafting a good many
items before being able to craft a final product, as shown in Figure
12.

Games with strongly defined recipes are better equipped to have crafting
trees. As the ingredients are explicitly laid out in front of the
player, it is easy for a player to see how crafting one item allows for
the ability to craft a second. It also often fits naturally within the
game world—many defined recipes are for more refined raw materials that
will be used to craft more complex objects at the roots of crafting
trees.

Not all prerequisite crafting is a crafting tree; sometimes a player
needs to craft an item before a particular new set of crafting mechanics
are available, or a crafted item might be the way to explicitly unlock a
recipe or resource.

Mechanics Changes

Sometimes games provide progression by revealing more mechanics to the
player as she crafts. This is highly common in games that have multiple
crafting subsystems, as they tend to be introduced gradually, waiting
until a player is comfortable with one before moving on to the next.
There is no requirement that this be the case, and certainly games
running a god or sandbox mode reveal all of the crafting abilities to
the player at once. That is, what a player may usually experience as
gradual changes can be presented as not being changed, but we consider
them mechanics changes as they are still comprised of different
sub-systems.

In Minecraft, players start with a very
small set of abilities. After punching down their first tree, they can
create a workbench which vastly expands the set of available crafting
options. As they progress, they can eventually create a brewing stand,
which unlocks a different set of crafting mechanics for creating
potions, and an enchantment table, for crafting enchanted items (Figure
19).

Figure 19.

Some of the various crafting stations in Minecraft. Each interface has its own mechanics, which
allows players to make more items and also gives a sense of
mastery.

In Final Fantasy XIV, the crafting
professions are individually leveled. At level 13, players learn
"Observe" which is a skill that does literally
nothing. At this higher level, and with this skill, players are prompted
to learn about item conditions, which they have had no control over and
no reason to care about up until now (Figure 15). Players learn how to
optimize quality gains when the condition of items is
"excellent" and use "Observe"
when the condition is "poor," minimizing quality
loss.

Goals in Crafting

Progression is often tethered to goal-setting and what a player wants to
achieve. For example, a player who wants to become the best crafter as
quickly as possible will likely craft different items than one who wants
to craft for the highest amount of profit. People may follow long,
winding and very different paths through crafting trees to get vastly
different final items. Tying into Social Aspects, as part of
progression, crafters may specialize, opening up new mechanics, recipes
and/or resources, but being gated out of other mechanics, recipes and/or
resources.

A unique case of a crafting system as a driver for narrative progression,
Dark Cloud’s town-building puzzle
heavily motivates the player toward one specific goal of restoring the
town to how it used to be. The player is free to place buildings, bits
of road, and water wherever she likes, and to fill the houses with
whomever and whatever she likes. However, for example, if the
protagonist’s main window doesn’t face eastward and if the house doesn’t
include a keg, chimney, upstairs storage, Renee (the protagonist’s
mother), a llama, and a stray cat, then the player cannot receive the
second party member, Xiao. Without the proper party members, dungeon
bosses and mechanics can be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Progression is gated by not just crafting, but by building the town to
be precisely how the NPCs desire. This is also an interesting case study
for Player Expressiveness as the player must navigate a tension between
her aesthetic crafting goals and the systematically-enforced desires of
NPCs.

Each dimension, on its own, covers just a facet of the full experience of
a crafting system. In some cases, we’ve discussed how interplay between
dimension scores affords different ways to view a crafting system. This
is only a small part of how different dimension settings work together
to describe the experience of crafting in a game. We hope that future
work can dive deeper into dimension interplay.

Beyond the Dimensions

With all the dimensions presented in this paper, there is still much more that
remains to be explored within the broad definition of crafting systems we
outlined earlier. However, the following sections, while important to many
crafting systems, were too narrow or too complex and multifaceted to classify as
a common attribute representable with a single numerical value. However, in the
games we analyzed, the following concepts of automation and social involvement
offered notable parallels to real-world crafting.

Automation

Crafting systems are sometimes focused on the single production of an item,
letting players imbue that item with meaning and care. However, some games
let players mass produce items, or let large chunks of the system run
automatically with no player input for extended periods of time. In short,
some games give players the ability to automate their crafting systems.

Automation starts to push a crafting system into a different experience than
one often associated with real-world hand-crafting. Going from an intimate,
item-by-item experience in games like Cooking Mama
where each step of the crafting process is a rich minigame, to a
large-scale operation, powered by automated actions or helper systems like a
redstone powered[16]
mining operation in Minecraft, changes how the
player crafts. We can look at both of these styles in terms of how various
positions on the dimensions help afford automation.

Automation affordances score low in the Fidelity of Action dimension. High
fidelity crafting systems often have highly detailed, complex, (virtually)
embodied actions that take time and focus for a player to complete.
Automation pushes against this, as it tries to afford an experience that’s
focused on producing and handling crafting outcomes at a large scale, rather
than embodied action. A way to look at large scale crafting is that a
crafter is creating an operation, rather than the items. Massively
multiplayer online game (MMOs) crafting systems often invoke similar
feelings, as Robert Rice points out, "More often than not the process is unrewarding and
more like a highly repetitive mass production and manufacturing of
items"
[Rice 2006, 139]. We do not make any claims about MMO crafting feeling rewarding or
not, but do agree that MMO crafting often has crafters create large
quantities of similar items.

It is unsurprising, then, that MMOs allow for macroing. Macroing can afford
automation while maintaining a higher degree of player fidelity. A macro is
a small program, built within game provided tools, that can automate some
character actions. As a defense against botting, or having entirely
autonomously controlled agents within a game, it is rare to see program flow
control structures or loops as part of a game-provided toolkit for macroing.
However, some games have historically afforded loops and if statements in
their macro systems; for example, Star Wars
Galaxies had self-callable macros, which affords repetition like
loops through recursion. With a rich macroing language, a game can have a
higher degree of fidelity while still allowing some players to automate the
process.

Games with strongly defined recipes (see Recipe Definition) often support
automation. Because a recipe has a known, fixed number of input components,
recipes can be made in batches. Fixed recipes also help with macro design
and creation, as the actions that lead to success are listed to the player
and encoded in the system. However, even games with no recipe definition can
afford automation.

Minecraft block generators are player-crafted
machines that produce resources for players to perform more block-placement
crafting (Figure 20). The machines themselves are created by taking
advantage of Minecraft’s physics engine and
placing particular blocks in particular locations (Terraria has similar player creations, see Out-of-Game, below).
Although this doesn’t afford automation of the actual crafting process (in
terms of block placement), it still works as an inroad into working with
crafting at a large scale. It also does take some crafting know-how and
skill to set up a block generator in the first place.

Figure 20.

A running cobblestone block generator in Minecraft. This sort of work does not automate the crafting
process, unlike macro engines, but shows how freeform crafting can lead
to creations that ‘craft’ on their own, or automate other parts of the
game.

Variable Outcome is problematic when it comes to automation, especially when
we reflect back on real-world crafting. On one hand, games that read high on
this dimension often work as motivation for why a player might want to
automate the crafting process. A player searching for an optimal item in a
game with a lot of randomness in crafting might need to craft the same item
20, 50 or even 100 times. It is not hard to imagine why such a player might
want autonomous tools. On the other hand, Variable Outcome thwarts the
regulation that is associated with mass production, automation and the
workmanship of certainty. Crafting systems with high variable outcome have
large fluctuations in outcome quality even with automated ways to go about
the crafting process. Crafting systems high in variable outcome have a
reason to add automation affordances to their crafting systems to help
mediate the monotony of searching for a highly desirable outcome. However,
this process of using automation to burn through bad results is a different
experience from how automation functions in real-world crafting, where
automation and the workmanship of certainty prevent particular bad results
from ever occurring.

So far, we have only discussed the production of a large quantity of in-world
items. Along with automating the crafting process to allow for players to
produce a large quantity of items, games also afford a player to inspect,
handle, and quantize a large amount of crafted output. These sorts of
systems are a bit beyond the scope of this paper, but it is worth
remembering that crafting systems do not exist in a vacuum.

Economic systems like World of Warcraft’s
auction house, combined with third party analysis tools (e.g., wowuction.com) that measure things
like the amount of a particular item currently being sold, its local average
sale price versus a historical sale price and the amount of currency
currently in circulation, allow players to make informed decisions about the
large number of items a macro-wielding worker may create.

Social Aspects

Community is a fundamental component of not only the history of crafting, but
also the modern resurgence of crafts and crafting in games. However, the
wide range of amount and types of social involvement in different games,
both in-game and out-of-game, made the concept too awkward to include as its
own dimension of crafting systems. The social examples we use here are
directly applicable to the embedded crafting systems within the games cited
and may be generalized to other games or genres.

In-Game

Crafting systems with in-game social involvement necessarily need some
amount of multiplayer connection, either as a MMO-type game or with the
ability to share in-game entities with other players. Within these
games, players can make commissions of other players personally, as well
as trade their crafted goods in in-game auction houses, or simply
collect or curate their favorite designs. For example, MMOs such as
World of Warcraft often make use of
consumable materials like potions that improve the player’s abilities
for a short time and are needed regularly by active players. WoW also makes use of communal improvements,
such as cauldrons of flasks from the Burning
Crusade and Legion expansions,
or food carts from the Mists of Pandaria
expansion and "feasts" from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion onward.

In some MMOs with many professions, different professions require
materials from each other, and a single player may need to make another
character with that profession, or be forced to buy or trade for
materials with other players. Some players of MMO games that include a
free market economy spend all their time manipulating the market or
taking advantage of changes in the ever-updating game. Players may
choose to make their money mass-producing ingredients for other crafters
(see Automation), or buying all items of a type and owning part of the
market. Crafters in real life struggle with pricing and selling their
goods as well, whether in-person during craft fairs or on websites such
as Etsy (see The Evolution of Crafts).

There are a few interesting single-player examples either modeling social
behavior for crafters or cleverly sharing in-game entities without
embodied trade or currency at all. Recettear: An
Item Shop’s Tale is a game about crafting an item shop,
including gathering your own stock items, curating your shop’s
atmosphere (by changing the walling and flooring), and haggling with
customers. Customers have a reputation with the player character which
increases their budget, so short-term discounts may lead to long-term
profits. Not many games bother with modeling these social behaviors,
which leaves this space very under-explored. Another game, Spore, managed to share its wide variety of
creatures between players without a connection between them by saving
creature data in a PNG image. The Sporepedia hosts, among other items, a
gallery of images that any Spore player can
grab and upload as a fully functioning creature using only 8KB of data.
However, to avoid intentional hacking, the creators of Spore obfuscated how the data was encoded
within the image.

Out-of-Game

There is no limit on how players connect outside of games. Many games
have entries in GameFAQs, a website with
fan-made walkthroughs, guides, maps, save files, Q&A, and a forum
where fans can post polls or pose deeper questions for discussion.
Reddit is another common communal area
for unstructured game questions and strategy discussion. More popular
games have either company-hosted or fan-curated Wiki pages, such as
Sporepedia, which include official-looking guides with images and
hyperlinks defining everything from game concepts to crafting trees and
character stats. Fan-curated content may also include community
strategies and sometimes exploits that the creators of the game may
monitor for future updates.

In general, these websites offer players a means to share details about a
game’s crafting system, such as Minecraft’s
crafting trees, where often no such resource exists in-game. Players can
also offer player-made recipes for complex structures, such as Terraria’s obsidian farm, which generates a
highly-valued resource every player wants but is difficult to obtain.
The sharing of recipes and techniques is an exact parallel to real-life
crafts. There is a massive amount of craft tutorial videos on YouTube, as well as crafting pattern sharing
or hosting websites such as Craftster,
Ravelry, and Craftsy (see The Evolution of Crafts).

In-and-Out-of-Game

The rise of Facebook games in the 2000’s
rocked the gaming industry, where Farmville
brought Zynga and casual games to the forefront. Using psychological
skinner box techniques like those described as "dark
patterns" by Lewis [Lewis 2014], Farmville reached critical mass by motivating
its players to share, poke, prod, and harass their real-life friends for
in-game rewards. The more active friends you had, the more materials you
had to craft with, and the better you were at the game. Many people made
multiple accounts or simply made a separate account for gaming
altogether, collecting hundreds and thousands of fellow gamers as
friends. Farmville’s model of mixing
out-of-game viral marketing and in-game rewards became the foundation of
a whole new genre of games, many of which include crafting, such as
Castleville.

Both automation and social play go beyond just crafting, showcasing an
instance of a separate system to afford different play experiences in a
crafting system (automation) and an instance of of how crafting can work
with other game systems to afford different play experiences (social
play). These lines are fuzzy, as automation often ties into in-game
economies, which are primarily a social phenomenon. We hope that this
section motivates future inspection in game crafting. This is not a
complete listing of all ideas that touch on crafting, but showcase some
concepts around potential future discussion on crafting in games.

Conclusion

Within games journalism and design, there is not a strong definition of what
crafting is or means in games. We’ve proposed a definition of crafting and shown
a seven-dimensional framework that highlights important features of crafting
across a myriad of games and systems. In Recipe Definition we separated games
around the notion of a recipe and how free-form the crafting experience may be.
For the Fidelity of Action dimension, we examined how detailed and performative
player actions are, and how closely they correspond to any real-world crafting
equivalents. We enumerated the types of constraints a game puts on completing a
craft in Completion Constraints. We addressed randomness and the amount of
control a player has over the outcome of a crafting attempt in Variable Outcome.
We analyze how richly a system understands and models the outcome of a crafting
attempt in System Recognition of Outcome. In Player Expressiveness, we examined
the range of creative actions available in crafting domains, and how they are
supported by material and formal affordances. Finally, for the Progression
dimension, we enumerated the types of advancement the player may achieve from
interacting with the crafting system over time.

Each of these dimensions is important in its own right, and we have shown through
many examples that there is no one set of scores on these dimensions that
represent a ‘canonical’ or ideal crafting system. This framework is remarkably
flexible, providing a useful lens for games that might not fall under the
traditional umbrella of crafting, but which have crafting elements. We looked at
various crafting-like actions in games, from placing blocks in Minecraft to designing spacecraft in Kerbal Space Program. Although not covered in detail
in this paper, we’ve even looked at crafting-like systems in borderline cases of
crafting, ranging from link exploration in With Those We
Love Alive to katamari accretion in Katamari
Damacy. The affiliated web visualization showcases these extra
examples.

Notes

[1] While videogames and other computational media
enable different kinds of systems modeling and moment-to-moment interaction
patterns, crafting also appears in physical and tabletop games. These are
equally applicable to our model of crafting systems.

[6] Games that only contain crafting in
their theme or visual style, rather than player actions, are not
considered to have crafting systems, and are therefore not explored
as examples for our crafting systems framework.

[7] For more information on the use of entity and its
context in game worlds, see [Zagal et al. 2007]

[8] The creation process does
not include, for example, player gathering of ingredients beforehand.

[9] Representation within the game world removes
game modding from consideration as crafting in games.

[10] According to Wardrip-Fruin et. al.,
agency can be considered as a result of not just the player, but the
player and the game [Wardrip-Fruin et al. 2009]. In this
case, a relaxed recipe does not necessarily increase agency without
the game supporting and enabling that freedom with
mechanics.

[12]CodeSpells is in beta as of the
writing of this paper and is subject to radical change. For
example, the designers may remove the ability to look at the
underlying code behind the visual language before
release.

[13] This is true from when Pokémon breeding was introduced in Pokémon Gold/Silver up until Pokémon X/Y. Pokémon
Sun/Moon has a sauna, where players can leave eggs for
breeding. Hatch time, for eggs in the sauna, is measured in
real-world time, much like Eve Online
manufacturing.